Posts Tagged ‘S-300 missles’

Newscast Media MOSCOW—As tensions continued to simmer over Syria, Russia has said it would neither participate in any direct armed confrontation nor stand on the sidelines should a war break out in the Levantine state.

Displaying skills of a veteran grandmaster used to making calibrated moves on the diplomatic chessboard, Mr. Putin chose to rely on studied ambiguity while carefully deliberating on Moscow’s forthcoming plans.

Putin spoke in a well-timed interview withto Channel One and the Associated Press (AP) ahead of the G-20 summit which is expected to be dominated by the Syrian crisis, Russian President Vladimir Putin said: “Certainly, we do not intend and will not engage in any conflicts.” But he added that, “We have our own ideas about what and how we are going to do in the event of conflict development with the use of
weapons, or without it. We have our own plans, but it’s still too early to talk about it.”

If there was a clue about the trajectory of the President’s thinking, it came in the form of his revelation that Moscow was ready to arm Syria with “game-changing” S-300 air defence missiles, if the need arose.

Moscow would also be ready to transfer advanced weapons to “some regions in the world” in case “international regulations” were violated. “We have a contract for the delivery of the air defence systems S-300, we have delivered some components [to Syria] for these air defence systems, but the supplies are not complete, we have suspended the supplies,” the Russian leader affirmed. However, “if we witness that
some steps are being taken in violation of the effective international regulations, we will think it over how we should act in the future, particularly regarding the supplies of such sensitive weapons in some regions of the world”.

Mr. Putin said Russia’s arsenal of air defense missiles had grown in sophistication beyond the S-300 missiles, signalling that supplies to foreign partners may not be confined to these projectiles.

The President pointed out that the S-300 missiles were inferior to the latest S-400 air defense systems and the S-500s, which were in the developmental stage.